Amazon Unveils Digital Rental Service for Textbooks

Online retail giant and Kindle maker Amazon began offering digital text books on rent for its Kindle e-reader - a move, which is likely to spare college students the burden of soaring text book prices.

The new offering, named Kindle Textbook Rental, allows students to take digital versions of their text books on rent for a period of one month to 360 days.

"We're excited to offer students an option to rent Kindle textbooks and only pay for the time they need – with savings up to 80 per cent off the print list price on a 30-day rental," Amazon's Kindle kingpin Dave Limp said in a statement.

Limp also pointed out that students often appreciated his company’s effort to make new and used printed text books available at a fairly low price."We're extending our Whispersync technology so that you get to keep and access all of your notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, available anytime, anywhere,” he continued.

This means, even if a rental expires, any user on resuming the rent or purchasing the book will find all his notes just the same way as he left them.

Students can download the Kindle app for any of the platform they prefer to read their textbooks on. More information about the program may be found here.